Sagano Bamboo Grove

The famous section is shorter than the photographs suggest. Perhaps 200 metres of path between the back of Tenryu-ji and the gate of Okochi Sanso has bamboo tall enough on both sides to close over your head, and that is the stretch everyone comes for. The rest of the walk is pleasant and ordinary.

The bamboo is moso, the giant timber species, and in April and May it grows at up to about a metre a day. The stems creak and knock against each other in wind, a sound the Environment Ministry put on its list of the hundred soundscapes of Japan in 1996. You will not hear it in the middle of the day, because several thousand other people are also there.

There is no entry fee, no gate and no closing time, and that is the whole strategy. Be there before seven in the morning and the path is almost empty, the light comes through sideways, and the sound is audible. By nine the rickshaws are running and the path is a slow-moving queue of people photographing each other. Late evening works too; the path is unlit but passable, and it clears out completely.

A request that visitors take seriously in Japan and often not elsewhere: do not carve into the stems. Graffiti has damaged a lot of the bamboo along the fenced sections and the cut marks stay for the life of the plant.

Nonomiya Shrine sits at the southern end, small and mossy, and appears in the Tale of Genji as the place Lady Rokujo's daughter purified herself. Okochi Sanso at the north end charges 1,000 yen including matcha, and the hillside garden has the view over Kyoto that the grove itself does not.